James Walkinshaw, who currently serves on the Fairfax County, Va., Board of Supervisors and is campaigning for election to Congress, joined MeriTalk’s Tech Tonic event on Thursday evening where he pledged to continue the Federal IT work of his former boss, Rep. Gerry Connolly.
After prevailing in the Democratic primary in June, Walkinshaw has emerged as a clear frontrunner to succeed Rep. Connolly to represent the 11th district of Virginia in Congress. For 11 years, Walkinshaw served as the chief of staff for Rep. Connolly, who died in May after a battle with esophageal cancer.
Walkinshaw is facing off against Republican Stewart Whitson in a special election on Sept. 9 to fill the seat previously held by Rep. Connolly.
“One of the things I learned over my 11 years with Gerry Connolly is, if we want to make government work and work well, we’ve got to have good people, and we’ve got to have good technology,” Walkinshaw said. “Getting the right technologies into the Federal government will be a priority of mine.”
Walkinshaw said that during his time working on Capitol Hill, he “had the honor” of working on several major Federal IT and government technology issues. In particular, he worked closely on the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA) and was involved in numerous FITARA Scorecard hearings held by the House Oversight and Reform Committee.
Rep. Connolly was the author of FITARA, which was enacted in 2014 and led to the FITARA Scorecard that grades the 24 largest Federal agencies on their progress across a range of IT-related categories.
As of September 2024, the implementation of FITARA has resulted in $31.4 billion in cost savings across the Federal government.
“We’re obviously in a time of transition when it comes to government technology and Federal IT, and one of my priorities will be making sure that what comes next delivers real results for the American people,” Walkinshaw said. “We’ve got to have, as I said, the right people and the right technology to do that.”
Walkinshaw said Rep. Connolly was a “Federal IT champion,” and added, “I hope to continue his work. I think he was able to accomplish so much in this space because he stuck with it for a long time.”
“I can tell you, in Congress, there are a lot of sexier issues, issues that will get you on MSNBC or Fox News, depending on your perspective, but this is an issue where if you dig in and work on it over time, you can make real progress and make things better for folks, and that’s what I hope to do in partnership with all of you,” he said.
Also speaking at Tech Tonic was Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, D-Va., who noted that prior to his time in Congress, he served as a technology policy advisor in the Obama administration.
He now serves on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology and the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability – in which he is also a member of the Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation Subcommittee.
“So, I know a little bit about what you guys do,” Rep. Subramanyam told the crowd of Tech Tonic attendees. “The work that you do is critically important to our country, so I want to thank you for all that you do.”
“Moving forward, I want us to be a leader in technology and a leader in innovation,” he added. “I want our Federal government to be providing the best services for the American people.”